Sexual assault on the rez

Will the Obama administration's efforts in Indian Country
help end a decades-long epidemic of sexual violence and abuse against women on
reservations? One can only hope that the momentum spurred by the Tribal
Law and Order Act of 2010 and the work of a new Department of Justice task
force to streamline prosecution of
violent crimes against women on the rez will result in systemic reform. That's what it will take for victims to have the confidence to bring charges and know
that they won't be brushed off, blamed, or retaliated against.

The current problems with violent crime are meticulously reported in a damning article in this
month's Harper's Magazine. (A subscription is required to read
online; the piece alone is worth the magazine's $6.99 cover price.) In the
story, writer Kathie Dobie outlines how the failures of the tribal and federal criminal
justice systems have led to high crime rates and few convictions for violent
offenders on reservations. Dobie begins by documenting the difficulties she
experienced in even reporting on the subject, Obama's commitment
to transparency and open government notwithstanding:

"My second day on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation
in the Dakotas, an official from the Bureau of Indian affairs sent a memo to
all its law-enforcement employees forbidding them to talk to me."

The piece goes on to catalog the impediments to justice
for women assaulted on the rez. First there's the federal government's failure
to prosecute all but the most heinous cases -- a 2007 Denver Post series reported that, between 1997 and 2006, federal prosecutors declined
two-thirds of the cases brought to them by the BIA and FBI. There are also
jurisdictional challenges: tribal police can prosecute tribal members, but the
feds have to prosecute non-tribal members even if the crime is committed in
Indian Country. And then there's what Dobie refers to as the small-town nature
and culture of reservations, where an assaulted woman may be perceived as
getting what she deserved, and petty biases may determine whether or not a
crime is taken seriously -- even by a police officer or hospital employee, as the
story documents.

Standing Rock may be exemplary in the dysfunction it
exhibits in handling crimes against women, but it is hardly unique. Outlining
the investigative process for violent crimes, Dobie perfectly illustrates the capricious
nature of justice on the rez:

[On] Standing Rock, the beginning of a
major-crime investigation doesn’t follow procedure so much as get passed from
one contingency to another. A victim calls the police--or doesn’t. She may not
have a phone, or cell reception (it’s spotty on the reservation), or she may
not trust the police (there’s currently a civil suit against one of Standing
Rock’s officers for unlawful arrests and physical abuse), or she may be afraid
of her assailant or ashamed or convinced her report will come to nothing. If
she calls the police, the phone is answered--or it isn’t. If the phone is
answered, the dispatcher notifies the officers on duty--or he doesn’t. If the
dispatcher notifies the officers on duty, they arrive shortly after the crime
is committed--or they don’t. If the officers are on another call in, say,
McLaughlin, South Dakota, and the victim lives in, say, Solen, North Dakota,
they will get to her but it may take a few hours. Or if the weather’s bad and
the victim lives at the end of an unplowed dirt road, the police can’t get to
her until the weather and roads clear. At one time, the Indian Health Service
hospital at Fort Yates administered rape kits, and then for a few years they
didn’t, and last summer they began again.

This August, High
Country News covered the
Bureau of Indian Affair's attempts to reform its police academy -- which
has suffered from a 20 to 30 percent graduation rate. We also wrote about the
hurdles faced by the Tribal
Law and Order Act. Dobie's article brings these challenges home with the
depressing story of one reservation, and generations of women, suffering from
legal and social dysfunction. Let's hope the efforts of the Justice Department
and the Obama administration make some headway on this problem.